Finally got around to plugging in the router my buddy gave me. When I pulled it out of the box it was configured for a password on the admin account. I had pressed the reset button with a pen, but apparently hadn't done it long enough. Tried again for at least 10-20 seconds and then I was able to get into the router's web interface without a problem.

Running through the "wizard" had me connected outbound within seconds...it was actually too easy. I was paranoid that something must be wrong somewhere. I guess this is the wonder of Windows XP's PnP when it works.

Inbound connections, however, were not occuring. For the port forwarding on this to work, you need static internal IPs.

  • Control Panel > Network Connections > My DSL Connection > Properties
  • Highlight TCP/IP protocol and click Properties.
  • Setup with a static IP address outside the router's DHCP range.
  • Set the internal IP of the router as the preferred DNS server.
  • In the router's configuration turn off DHCP.
  • Now you can start setting up services to forward - on the AT&T 6800G these are called "Virtual Servers", but normally it's port forwarding or something like that.
  • For each server you have running on the internal machine with the static IP address you setup a rule that forwards traffic from the WAN side of the router for a specific port to the IP of the machine on the LAN that is listening for traffic. The port the server is listening on need not match the WAN side port external traffic uses to connect to your router.